Falling B grades signal community decline

Few things visualize the impact of the pandemic and the sad slide of social wellness in Greater Victoria quite so pointedly as the 2022 Vital Signs survey results.

Take a look at these charts highlighting findings from the Victoria Foundation report. 

What caught my eye was the one that compared 10 years of survey data where participants grade a dozen "key areas" that together make up a healthy community - things like belonging, arts and culture, the economy, health and wellness, standard of living, etc.

Straight As are a lot to ask for, but a B grade ought to be achievable for a Canadian city of privilege and wealth in 2022. Respondents are asked to give a B grade if they think a particular key area is good but could use some improvement. In years past, a majority of Greater Victorians responding to the survey ranked most of the key areas at B or higher.

But that was before. Vital Signs 2022 compared B grades across 10 years' worth of surveys, and what is revealed is a community that fell hard in the pandemic and has yet to find its way back out. Scores for every one of the 12 indicators fell significantly in 2020, and most are still falling. 

Sure, we're talking a global pandemic. Excuse us if we're not back to normal yet. But take a moment to mull over that decade of numbers and you'll notice how little improvement we were seeing in any of them since well before the pandemic got us. We've been "good but needs improvement" for years on key measures of community wellness, and now we're not even achieving that. 

If you've lived in Greater Victoria for any length of time, your own eyes have probably been telling you that for some time now. Mine certainly have. It's disturbing to see that housing has consistently scored poorly at least back to 2013, and yet each new year comes and goes in worsening crisis.

So yeah, could be it's the pandemic messing with our community wellness and things will be good again soon. Or not.

I pulled out five key areas to highlight in this graph below. They've seen the most dramatic decline, and yet are such necessary components of a healthy community. Belonging, getting started in the community, health and wellness, housing, safety - those are the foundations of a good life. These falling indicators are telling us that all is decidedly not well. 

What can be done? A lot. But how it will get done is the burning question. On housing, I hear the same conversations now that were going on 15 years ago. They are getting us nowhere, even while the tents and the chaos and the poisoned people and the abandoned grocery carts keep piling up along Pandora Avenue.

We are paralyzed by political cycles, shifting priorities, clashes in opinion and perspective, and a general feeling that "somebody ought to do something about that" without anyone actually thinking it's them. 

These are the crises of our times. If we are unable to figure out how to take action collectively across long-term, difficult issues that are really going to hurt to fix, our problems can only deepen. How many bad things in your own life have ever gotten better because you ignored them?

Yes, our region is a beautiful place and life is pretty good for most of us. But it's quite awful for others of us, and it's getting worse. We either get on that for real or it gets worse for everyone.

Blog site, awaken!

I'm emerging from almost five years of largely ignoring this 15-year-old blog of mine with a plan to get back to more writing. Here's a photo of me and my partner on a bit of a crazy horseback trek this past summer, just to put me back in the minds of those who once read me.

I like writing about things that catch my attention with some element of weirdness, wrongness, out of syncness, or some other quality that can be broadly summed up as "Things that make you go, 'Hmm.'" 

I am not a funny writer, so don't expect that. I did write one piece 10 years ago when we were living and working in Honduras that I continue to find quite amusing, but that's pretty much it. I am also not a muser about things in the 'hood, people I know, foods I like/hate, or all that softish lifestyle stuff. 

(An exception might be some unexpected opportunity to share eye makeup tips for aging women, because that is a long-standing interest of mine and I have exactly one friend who I can talk to about that. I wish I could write about my low-histamine diet as a wonder cure for my allergies, too, but I've already seen just how glazed people's eyes get when I try bring that subject up.)

I expect to be writing a lot about sex work and that we're way past time to decriminalize it in Canada. That issue is my No. 1 hobby horse. 

To that end, here are a couple of pieces I wrote recently for the blog of a long-time friend who runs an escort agency here in Victoria, BC. These take a look at two men with significant disabilities who hire sex workers when their fixed incomes allow for a bit of a treat. Find Frankie's story here, and Vinnie's story here. 

Other hobby horses include climate change, the very obvious decay in BC's ability to support all the citizens who need help, and various hypocrisies that emerge in the headlines from time to time and drive a right-thinking person mad. 

I do a little amateur video work on occasion because I find it an intriguing story-telling medium; to that end, I grabbed some charts from the BC Centre for Disease Control report on the impact of BC's poison drug supply and made up this little two-minute video, astounding for what it reveals about just how profoundly we are failing on this issue. 

So sometimes I'll mix some of that issue in here, because the fact that 10,000 British Columbians have died since 2015 from taking poisoned drugs is pretty freaking astounding. I'm still waiting to read The Story that answers how the hell we got to this point and why we can't seem to fix it, so maybe I'll just go see what I can find out.

This is not my first rodeo with a blog, and I go into my site's revival with low expectations of  readers, who will be scarce and likely still strangely obsessed with a long-ago post I did saying I didn't like David Suzuki much, which has inexplicably been read by more than 22,000 people. 

As for those who leave comments on my posts, they will mostly be spambots inserting links advertising Mumbai escorts and treks in Nepal. 

Occasionally a real person will post a genuine comment, and some of them will say something really trollish and horrible. But I've been out there as a writer in the public eye since 1982 and have skin of a rhino after all the terrible things said to me over the years. (OK, I admit that I'm still stung by the random dude who saw me doing a newspaper promo on TV way back when while I was at the Victoria Times Colonist and called up to tell me I looked like "a blowsy biker chick.")

There's something to be said for just having a place where your thoughts can be thrown out into the world - a place that I can rely on as well to help me rediscover some past insight I remember having rather than realize that I put it on Facebook instead and it's now lost to time.

 And so, dear blog, I bring you back to life. Let's go see where a closer look might lead us. 

Deniers, Hoarders, Invincibles, Worriers - the many faces of our COVID-19 tribes

Sixteen faces of COVID-19 “personalities” are emerging around the world as people react to unprecedented weirdness in very different ways.

In work published at Nature.com last month, Norwegian researcher Mimi Lam identifies 16 COVID-19 personality types that are in evidence across the globe as the pandemic grinds on.

She argues that countries need to understand these "viral identities" and strive to educate people in ways that unite people rather than drive them farther apart, and to use the personality types to improve modelling of how the virus will spread in a specific region or country. "The global COVID-19 pandemic unites us with a common virus, but divides us with emergent viral identities," she notes.

“These emergent viral identities are influencing individual behavioural and government policy responses to the heightened uncertainty posed by COVID-19. Individuals often respond to policies by protecting their values and identities, so for some, COVID-19 has reinforced social and political identities,” writes Lam.

“Social identities foster a sense of belonging via attachment to social groups and their behaviours. Salient identities contribute to common views on policies and shape behaviours to benefit in-groups These salient viral identities have heightened inter-group differentiation and explain the rampant racism against the Chinese, as well as initial policy responses of border closures oriented to protect ‘Us’ against ‘Them.’ “

Here are the 16 personality types:

• Deniers, who downplay the viral threat
• Spreaders, who want the virus to spread, herd immunity to develop, and normality to return
• Harmers, who may spit or cough at others or dub COVID-19 “Boomer Remover”
• Realists, who recognise the reality of its harm and adjust their behaviours
• Worriers, who stay informed and safe to manage their uncertainty and viral-induced fear
• Contemplators, who isolate and reflect on life and the world
• Hoarders, who panic-buy food, toilet paper, and other products to quell their insecurity
• Invincibles, often youth, who believe themselves to be immune and flock to beaches and parties
• Rebels, who defiantly flout social rules restricting their individual freedoms
• Blamers, who vent their fears and frustrations onto others, discriminating against racial groups or health-care workers
• Exploiters, who exploit the situation for power or brutality
• Innovators, who design or repurpose resources, for example, for face masks, ventilators, and other medical
• Supporters, who show their solidarity in support of others through, for example, claps, songs, and rainbows
• Altruists, who help the vulnerable, elderly, and isolated
• Warriors, like the front-line health-care workers who combat its grim reality
• Veterans, who experienced SARS or MERS and willingly comply with COVID-19 restrictions

Lam notes that using these personality types to refine forecasts of COVID transmission and impact could be an important tool in managing the virus. To forecast viral transmission, for instance, these behaviours can be “clustered by their projected compliance” into the modelling, and will reveal the benefits of not just flattening the viral curve but shifting behaviours.

Deniers, Harmers, Invincibles and Rebels are “non-compliers.” Spreaders, Blamers and Exploiters are “partial compliers.” Realists, Worriers, Contemplators, Hoarders, Innovators, Supporters, Altruists, Warriors and Veterans are “compliers.” What works to shift the behaviours of one group can inflame the mood among another. 

Lam cites the different way that countries reacted to social-distancing measures as exemplifying the need for approaches that recognize the 16 types of COVID personalities and identify strategies and modelling that take into account their very different behaviours during a pandemic.

“UK and US models assumed a uniform 85–90 per cent reduction in social contacts, as reported by Chinese citizens. However, unlike authoritarian regimes, liberal democracies cannot compel their populace to follow state-imposed restrictions. Variance in individual responses and willingness to comply with COVID-19 policy interventions can be captured if epidemiological models group individuals by their salient viral identities, informed by demographic variables.”

Who is Rod Baker?

Up until getting caught this week flying into a tiny Indigenous community in the Yukon to fake his way into an early COVID-19 vaccine, Rod Baker was a very, very wealthy Vancouver man presiding over a casino empire. 

What was going through his head when he chartered a plane into a hamlet of fewer than 100 people and made up a pack of lies so that he and his wife Ekaterina could jump the queue for their vaccinations? We may never know. Baker appears to have kept a low profile before the Beaver Creek scandal, and is certainly keeping one now. 

But poking around in the information that is available on Baker is intriguing, if only to gain a little more understanding of the kind of guy who launches quite an elaborate plot to get himself into a vaccine lineup intended for vulnerable Indigenous elders. 

Baker was president and CEO of the Great Canadian Gaming Corporation up until his abrupt resignation this week after the Beaver Creek story hit the headlines. He has been in that position since 2010, although the "CEO" part of the title wasn't added until 2011. 

Before that, he was the long-time president of the mysterious Ridgeline Corporation, a financial investment and private merchant banking firm that was headquartered in Toronto but whose office is now listed as "permanently closed." No website or corporate information turned up in my searches. Baker led Ridgeline from 1995-2018. 

Not only was Baker the CEO of Great Canadian, he sat on its board. His father Neil Baker was on the board for several years as well, appointed in 2011 and on the Corporate Compliance and Security Committee before leaving the board in 2018.

Rod Baker isn't mentioned in the 2020 financial documents on Great Canadian's website, but he figures prominently in a 2018 "Letter to Shareholders."  The letter notes that Baker owned/controlled 86 per cent of Great Canadian's common shares at that time. His father owned 12 per cent of common shares back when he was appointed to the board in 2011. 

Together, then, father and son owned or controlled 98 per cent of the company's shares - a signal that Great Canadian wasn't a publicly held company in any real sense of the term, but more like a family dynasty. 

That is an important detail to remember when reading that letter to shareholders, in which the company proudly notes its philosophy of "aligning the interests of the executive with the interests of shareholders" as a reason for Baker's multi-million-dollar compensation package. Rod Baker was top executive, member of the board and owner/controller of the majority of shares, rendering him pretty much the living embodiment of aligned interests. 

Notable about the decade of Baker's reign at Great Canadian is the company's prominence in allegations of money laundering. An Oct. 28, 2020 story in the Globe and Mail has this to say about Baker's lack of interest in looking too closely at the source of the mountains of cash that gamblers were bringing into Great Canadian - revenues that were directly tied to how much richer he would get. 

Stone Lee, a long-time investigator with British Columbia Lottery Corp., testified that in 2012 his boss Terry Towns, vice-president of corporate security and compliance at the time, told him and two other money-laundering specialists that they were to stop banning suspicious gamblers spending hundreds of thousands of dollars at River Rock. 

"I recall [Mr. Towns] said, ‘You guys are not police officers. Cut it out. You should not approach patrons, that's not your job. Your job is to observe and report.

Mr. Stone said the order from his boss was a result of Rod Baker, chief executive officer of Great Canadian Gaming Corp., which owns River Rock, complaining to the provincial gambling agency.

Once upon a time, Great Canadian was a small BC company launched to capitalize on the provincial government's growing interest in legalizing gambling. I remember those early casinos, which tended to be sad and scruffy places serving soggy eggroll bites to a handful of desperate-looking people. 

These days, Great Canadian owns gaming operations in four provinces and sold for $3.3 billion four months ago to Apollo Global Management, a "global alternative investment manager firm" out of New York City. Ah, how the times have changed. 

Rod Baker reportedly resigned from Great Canadian after the embarrassing Beaver Creek incident. It's probably safe to consider that a resign-or-we'll-fire-you move, but the wording also might signal that Baker's transgression didn't trigger the "just cause" clause in his contract. 

What does a top dog like Baker get when leaving a company that was essentially all his? That 2018  letter to shareholders estimated the cost of terminating Baker without just cause at $79 million (most of that from stock options).

So maybe this week's shaming stings a little. But it looks like the rent will still be covered. 

The man who refused to kill baby bears: A win in the Court of Right Thinking

A cute bear from Pixabay to stand in 
for the cubs that Casavant saved.

Court judgments are often answering questions that the average person wouldn't possibly think to ask about the issue of the moment, like "Did the judge err in declining to consider the jurisdictional issue on judicial review?"

But here's the quick version of BC conservation officer Bryce Casavant's story: He disobeyed a direct order from his boss to kill two bear cubs and instead took them to a rehabilitation facility (they've since been released back to the wild). He got fired as a result. And now the BC Court of Appeal has overturned that firing.

It wasn't overturned for the reasons that I would have overturned it, which would have been around things like questioning why you'd fire a guy who made an informed decision that saved wildlife without harming the public. That would be the Court of Right Thinking, and we don't have one of those.

But hurrah for all the complicated legal arguments the court cited that still ended up with Casavant winning his appeal. I like a conservation officer who tries to conserve.

The story starts out pretty low-key. Casavant was working in Port Hardy back in 2015 and got a call from a resident that a mother black bear and her two cubs were rummaging through the resident's garbage.

Casavant was told by his superiors to kill all three bears because they'd been habituated to eating human food and would continue to be nuisances. The resident said she hadn't seen the cubs eating garbage, so Casavant killed the mother and took the two cubs to a veterinarian for assessment. Deemed healthy, they were transferred to a wild animal recovery centre and would be eventually released back to the wild.

Then all hell broke loose back at Casavant's workplace, and he ended up being dismissed from his conservation job and told he was now working for the Forests Ministry. "The hope is that in your new position, given the different nature of the work involved, you will not suffer from the same inability to follow instructions and policies," his superiors wrote, citing two other incidents when he didn't follow their orders.

Much conflict and union involvement later, Casavant lost a lower court case about his dismissal and took it to the BC Court of Appeal. The court battle was all based on high-faluting legal arguments that had nothing to do with sparing the lives of two perfectly healthy bear cubs, but the upshot is that Casavant won, though perhaps only because the discipline procedure was messed up.

"In my view the best that can be done in these circumstances is to declare that the proceedings before the arbitrator and Board were a nullity, to confirm that Mr. Casavant’s dismissal should have been addressed under the Police Act, Special Provincial Constable Complaint Procedure Regulation, and to leave the parties to sort out the consequences of those declarations, if any, on the settlement agreement," wrote Justice Lauri Ann Fenlon in a June 4 unanimous decision.

No doubt the questionable psychologist's report used to justify firing Casavant because he was unfit for the work played a role in the appeal court's thinking. Asked to perform a general workplace environment assessment, the psychologist "instead provided an opinion about Mr. Casavant’s suitability for his position (a report for which the psychologist was eventually sanctioned by the College of Psychologists, which found the report to be unreliable and improperly obtained)."

Conservation officers play difficult roles mediating the relationship between wildlife and the public. Complex legal arguments aside, Casavant's case highlights that officers appear to be governed in quasi-military fashion, taking their orders from someone who isn't at the scene, didn't talk to the affected residents, and perhaps isn't even trained in conservation. (Haven't we all had bosses with zero experience in the work they're now supervising?)

Is this how the BC public imagines conservation to work? Surely we want skilled conservation officers able to assess the situation in that moment and make a decision that saves wild animals whenever possible. Casavant didn't win his appeal on that argument, but the Court of Right Thinking is feeling good about this decision.